Yup, the main attraction of this second iteration of the Juuko B-fighter series - Kaneto Shiozawa doing one of his best works hands down as the villain Dezzle and the King of Fenarinarsa/father of Minky Momo Hiroshi Masuoka in the pants of the grand chamberlain Dord permitting - is the fact that to the three main B-Fighters were added additional four B-Fighters coming from France, China, South America and THE UNITED STATES. Yes, apparently when Haim Saban took this series and dumbed it down for american children (totally ridicolous as this, like all tokusatsus, is primarly targeted at children to begin with) transforming it into the Beetleborg Metallix abomination had problems with an original source where not only the main character's parents live in the US, not only the main lead wants to study in America as his most important life goal but AN AMERICAN CHARACTER PERFORMED BY AN AMERICAN ACTOR IS PART OF THE B-FIGHTER TEAM, which amounts to something as useless and ridicolous as an hypothetical american remake of already 100% american-stylized products like Yasuzo Masamura's Aozora Musume or Yuzo Kawashima's Yoru No Nagare. And some specifically japanese elements present in this (Rakugo, Shamisen and Anmitsu, all stuff easily understandable by browsing wikipedia and/or youtube) don't make Metallix any less useless, all the contrary. That said, on the series itself, the costumes of both B-Fighters and villains are great (I personally really like Tento for her purple color, of course), the fights are well coreographed as usual, the mechas in this have a great design even if they're a bit underutilized, the only slight problem for me is that it didn't reach Sharivan or. Solbrain level of emotional involvment, but maybe it's a personal thing. Highly recommended if you like tokusatsus and animes and you want to have good fun.
P. S. Like I mentioned in my Kamen Rider OOO review, ALL the episodes written by queen of Hacks Yasuzo Kobayashi (8, 14, 21, 40 and 46, in case you're interested) were avoided in their entirety and I genuinely think my viewing experience was improved overall. Me thinks I'll do the same for Blue Swat and another hack with the same pronoun (Yuji Kobayashi) in my impending Gekiranger watching (sincere thanks to the lovely Yuka Hirata and her amazing gravure photos in green lingerie for the suggestion they gave me) with no regrets whatsoever.
P. P. S. My sincere thanks to Metallic Fansubs and KamenScrubsSentai for the work they did to get this series known outside the Japanese realms.
